Devalued links or negative affect?

[jayderby]

Hi there,

I'm looking into an issue with a site that was hit after Penguin was introduced.

The site lost 70% of traffic over night.

The site in question seemed to have a large number of backlinks with over optimized anchor text which seems to most likely be the reason for drop in rankings.

But there is also some links from blog networks here too unfortunately, so my question here really is do Google just devalue these links and discount them from consideration in their ranking algorithm or do the links still count but instead of adding positive affects in SERPs add a negative affect?

My reason for this question is I'm trying to determine whether it's worth saving this website or just starting fresh with a new domain.

That does bring me to another question, if I have to start fresh on a new domain is it a possibility to reuse the content from the old site? (providing I remove the URLs from Google via Webmaster tools).

Any help/advice/answers here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Debdulal]

If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools

_Honestly speaking I did not know that thanks for the update .. _

[MarieHaynes]

If you have a manual penalty you will have a warning in your Webmaster tools.

Now, if a website didn't have webmaster tools, you could set it up and then file a reconsideration request.  If there was no manual warning to start with you will get a notice from Google telling you so.

However, when you ask for a reconsideration request you are opening yourself up to potentially have a manual review from Google.  So if you're not squeaky clean you could end up attracting yourself a manual penalty on top of the algorithmic issues you have.

As far as diagnosing Penguin, here is some information on how to diagnose Penguin, but it's not always a simple diagnosis.

[Debdulal]

_But how do you know that your website is hit by penguin? I hope there is no way to tell whether a website is hit by penguin or manual penalty.  _

[jayderby]

Hi Marie,

That's a great response and inline with our thinking here. The links are not within our control and we've decided to start a fresh.

The site content ranked really well before Penguin so I am hoping it will recover fast.

Thanks and best regards,

Jason

[MarieHaynes]

A reconsideration request will not help if there is no manual warning in WMT. Penguin is algorithmic.

[Debdulal]

Ok, Here is the thing.

Did you send a reconsideration request?

_If not, please send reconsideration request after getting rid of some spammy links. Make sure you have listed all the URLs where the link references are still available in a separate Google Spreadsheet File along with the reconsideration request.  If you get a response that no manual action is taken, we can be sure of one thing that your website is hit by algo shuffle and this will make things murkier.

Now if your website is hit by manual penalty, you will get a response that the manual penalty is partially removed or not removed at all._

_Now, as some reputed online marketers say if you have not built those links, you would not have to care for them at all but if you have done it themselves, you need to get them down.  _

[MarieHaynes]

I really do think that sites with bad links are penalized as opposed to just losing the link juice from those links.  I am working on a site right now that was ranking well for years.  Then they hired an SEO to try to rank even better.  The SEO built a bunch of anchor texted links and on April 24 (Penguin) their rankings plummeted.

No one knows exactly what is necessary for recovery from Penguin.  I think a site can recover if the backlink issue is an easy one to fix.  For example, the SEOMoz article on WPMU recovery showed that they were able to remove a pile of footer anchor texted links and regain their rankings with the Penguin refresh on May 25.  But for most sites, if you've got anchor texted links in a bunch of places, recovery is pretty much impossible.

In doing unnatural links penalty removal I have found that maybe 15% of webmasters respond to my requests to remove links.  For some niches that number is higher.  But in order to recover from Penguin I'm guessing you'll need 85-95% of bad links removed and that is probably not going to happen.

I'd start fresh.  Definitely don't redirect the old domain to the new.

You can noindex all of the content on the old domain and reuse it on the new domain.  It may help to go into webmaster tools for the old domain and ask Google to remove the old urls from the index.

Of course, you'll be starting fresh and have to earn good quality backlinks. Good luck!

[jayderby]

Hi Alison, thanks for your help with this.

We started contacting webmasters initially however this proved to be a waste of time for the most part as the majority of webmasters didn't respond to requests.

A new site is looking like the way to go, thanks again.

[jayderby]

Thanks Deb Dulal Dey, unfortunately there are too many links to make this worth while doing. On the other hand the content on the site is very good though.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

[jayderby]

Thanks Baptiste, you've given me a lot to think about there.

[Debdulal]

Well, @Jason Brooks

Sorry to say but you need get rid of these crappy links otherwise your website will never be able to recover from Penguin update. And in the mean time, you need to make your website awesome by publishing great content that will help you earn some quality links the natural way.

[gcdtechnologies]

Hi Jason,

To answer the first question, low quality links can have a negative effect on rankings, particularly those associated with link networks or if the links look manipulative. That being said, most sites have some sort of spammy sites linking to them for reasons beyond their control, and Google don't seem likely to penalise a small amount of these - they will probably just ignore the links and discount any value that they would have passed.

Have you tried to clean up your link profile by contacting the webmasters of the blog networks and asking them to remove the links?

Starting completely from scratch seems a little extreme, but if you feel that the links are very extensive and hard to rectify, and if the current domain isn't ranking and doesn't have much authority, then it might be the easiest way to "start fresh". Bear in mind that a new domain is likely to be sandboxed and will take a substantial amount of time to gain trust and authority. It would be fine to reuse the content provided that the original content is removed and deindexed.

Good luck.

[baptisteplace]

Hi Jason,

With infos from the latest slideshare of Ian Howells, http://slideshare.net/ianhowells/life-after-penguin, I think some of these links are devaluated, and some are penalizing the site. You may remove them and confess to Google, or start on a new domain, or maybe use a new URL for every page, including the homepage.

This is a though question, penguin recovery is still an unknown process and nothing is guaranteed.

About content re-use, Howells did put the same content on another page, without 301 and it worked. Maybe you can put 404 or remove the content and put it on a fresh domain.